Category Archives: Sept. 11th

Ed Parkinson, Director of Government Affairs for the First Responder Network Authority, visited Washington State (“the other Washington”) and Oregon this week. Mr. Parkinson met with senior officials here in Washington, including the State CIO, Michael Cockrill, and the Director of Emergency Management. He met with Oregon State officials and also gave a talk at the joint meeting of the independent telecommunications companies of Oregon and Washington. His appearance here in the Pacific Northwest gives me some additional hope for this noble effort called FirstNet.

The First Responder Network Authority was created by Congress in February, 2012. It was authorized to use $7 billion in funds obtained from the auction of spectrum to wireless telecommunications companies. FirstNet’s mission is to design and build a nationwide public safety wireless broadband network. Congress broadly defined “public safety” as not just First Responders like cops and firefighters, but also transportation, utilities, public works and anyone who has a role in responding and fixing the incidents that occur every day, as well as responding to major disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes.

I am known as a skeptic of FirstNet’s progress, which I’ve blogged about in the past (Is FirstNet Stalled?).

But I’m also definitely heartened by recent developments in FirstNet’s efforts.

My current weather forecast for FirstNet is “fair and warmer”. Ed’s visit, plus a couple of other recent events contribute to that forecast. There are, however, a few storm clouds still on the horizon.

FirstNet

Here are some factors contributing to my sunnier forecast for FirstNet:

“We’re going to work with states to design this network.” FirstNet doesn’t just have a 12 step plan – it has a forty-five (45) step plan to design a network for each state. The plan includes a number of specific actions and meetings where local and state public safety officials will be engaged to specify the areas the network must cover, who will be authorized to use it, and how much it will cost.

FirstNet Folks are everywhere, underground and in the air. FirstNet acting general manager T. J. Kennedy, Ed Parkinson and other senior staff spend a lot of time speaking at conferences, talking to folks on the sidelines, answering questions, calling folks on the phone and responding to email. The procurement staff seem to be open to meeting with almost anyone who may have a service usable to FirstNet (if you can find their contact information). This represents a refreshing level of engagement.

State Consultation is on the Fast Track. FirstNet promised to publish a set of criteria on how they will work with states to design the network in each state by April 30th. And they met the deadline! David Buchanan is driving this process forward despite being short-staffed. FirstNet is actively working with state points of contact (like me) to set up meetings and come meet with local fire and police chiefs, mayors, sheriffs, county commissioners and others. The fact that Ed Parkinson visits with governors and states like Oregon and Washington is a positive sign.

A draft RFP by the end of 2014. FirstNet officials have promised a comprehensive request for proposals (RFP) for equipment and services. They’ve also promised to publish a draft of that RFP for review/comment by states, local jurisdictions and the vendor community. This is an excellent approach, as it should produce a good set of contracts which FirstNet can tap to build the network.

Public comment and review. FirstNet promises to ask its stakeholders – police and fire departments, transportation departments, electric and water utilities, commercial companies supplying products and others – to review some of its plans and ideas. These “public comments” build on a series of requests for information (RFIs) which FirstNet issued last year. This public comment process has worked well for other agencies such as the FCC and should help to generate good ideas for FirstNet. But as of this moment, such a process is still just a promise.

Storm Clouds with a bit of Light

Here are some of the storm clouds or difficult waters which FirstNet still needs to navigate:

“I’m from the Federal Government, and I’m here to help.” Congress said FirstNet is an “independent authority” within the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. Yeah. Right. FirstNet is part of the Federal government. When a citizen calls 911, the FBI doesn’t show up. The local fire or police department shows up. Usually within 4 to 10 minutes. And those local responders depend on local radio networks and local 911 centers for dispatch and communications. Anyone who has waited in a line at the social security office (“your current wait time is one hour, 54 minutes”) or a veteran’s hospital (“your current wait time is 2 years, 54 days”) knows what a federal bureaucracy can be like. FirstNet has acknowledged it is subject to the onerous Federal Acquisition Regulation for buying stuff and the ponderous Federal personnel process for hiring staff. FirstNet needs to show it is nimble and able to meet the needs of the cop on the beat or the electric company lineworker on a pole inches away from a 25 kilowatt power line.

How much will it cost me? Will it be sustainable? Will there be enough money to build and operate it? These are all questions which those of us who are state points of contact (SPOCs) get every day. And, hopefully, they will be answered as design moves forward.

Staffing. FirstNet is charged with creating technical designs and business plans for each one of 56 states and territories. Due to the onerous Federal personnel process (see above), most FirstNet staff have been hired as transfers from other federal agencies – that’s much easier to do than to hire people with experience on the street but outside the Federal personnel system. Finding highly skilled technical staff has been even more of a problem and charged with controversy. But gee, here we are, two+ years after FirstNet was created, and the agency is really not staffed to do its work, with only about 50 Federal employees and maybe 20 contractors. Of course the real numbers are murky because of …

Transparency (or lack thereof). President Obama promised an open, transparent, government on his first day in office, January 20, 2009. But Federal agencies have been as secretive as ever in withholding real information from citizens, as shown in a recent PBS documentary. I’ve urged FirstNet to trumpet every small success, to acknowledge failures, to talk publicly about every person they hire, full-timer or contractor, to be open about their roadmap and finances. I know FirstNet staff struggle within the straightjacket of Department of Commerce policies on this. And I’m heartened by their embracing regular webinars with stakeholders, Twitter (at least five FirstNet folks tweet) and blogging to improve transparency. But, gee, where is the list of FirstNet staff and contact information on their website? I couldn’t even find the name of the procurement officer much less a current organizational chart on the website. In terms of transparency, there is a ways to go …

Board meetings. FirstNet Board meetings are … well … ballet. They seem to be well-orchestrated public theater. The members are in a closed room in an disclosed location with video cameras for the rest of us to observe. When the meeting is over they escape out the back door to avoid reporters and those interested in engaging them. This is totally opposite of the way county commissions, city councils and state legislatures work, where officials are very approachable before and after meetings. I will immediately say individual board members such as Sue Swenson and Jeff Johnson, and senior FirstNet staff from T.J. Kennedy on up to the lowest-paid secretary are, individually, approachable and responsive to email and phone calls. But FirstNet Board meetings need to be coached on transparency and openness by any School Board meeting in any School District in the nation.

Advisory Committees. FirstNet has one advisory committee, the Public Safety Advisory Committee (PSAC) with 45 members. The meetings of the PSAC are closed. Although, again, the chair of the PSAC, Harlin McEwen, is very open and engaging with stakeholders. I personally think FirstNet could use an advisory committee of state elected officials (Governors, Attorneys General, Mayors) and perhaps an advisory committee of industry and commercial enterprises in addition to the PSAC. And PSAC meetings, just like FirstNet Board meetings or your local City Council meetings, need to be open for attendance by anyone.

I find that everyone I encounter at FirstNet, from Mr. Sam Ginn and Acting General Manager T. J. Kennedy on up to the administrative assistants, to be committed to the job.

In a similar way, 9/11 and the destruction of the World Trade Centers may have robbed the rest of us (even those of us now in our 60s) of our youth.

When Oswald killed John F. Kennedy, he also killed – or at least damaged – the “youthful outlook” of the “Greatest Generation” – those who had survived the Great Depression and put their “youth” on hold to fight World War II. That generation – which included my parents – came back to peacetime, after WWII, and immediately married, had kids (lots of kids – the Baby Boomers) and got engaged in work and business. This generation saw Kennedy as a hero. He was, indeed, a bonafide war hero from PT-109. But he also had an eloquence and a youthful outlook on the world symbolized by his goal to put a man on the moon and his speeches including “ask not what you can do for your country …” and “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans”.

Oswald killed all that.

And afterward, of course, my own generation would not “trust anyone over 30”; the nation became bogged down in the Vietnam War; and my parents became “old fogies”. Bill Flanagan on CBS Sunday Morning eloquently described the disillusionment which followed November 22, 1963.

Something similar occurred, I fear, after September 11, 2013. For over 230 years, the United States survived on isolationism. We were separated from Europe and Asia by vast oceans as well as centuries in time. The United States was the “young democracy” on the globe. Sure, we lived in fear of nuclear Armageddon during the Cold War. But “bombs dropping invisibly from the sky” is an abstract concept. And, of course, that nuclear war never happened.

September 11, 2001, changed all that.

The war came to our shores.

Americans died – by the thousands – in Manhattan.

And, I think, to a great extent, the “youthful outlook” of the generations who remember 9/11 died also.

Now we have a National Security Agency which tracks our phone calls and our social media and probably tracks our email and web browsing. We’ve built a giant security apparatus worthy of George Orwell’s 1984. Our drones strike at people around the world. We fear the Chinese have completely cyber-infiltrated our government systems and private businesses. Every time we go through a TSA line at an airport we are personally reminded that terrorists live among us. We’ve wasted trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives (including the lives of the dismembered) on foreign wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Every month another mass-shooting born of mental illness and despair seems to occur. And we are constantly reminded that our passwords are not secure, our financial information is not secure, and our very identities may be stolen.

I have great cause for hope, as well. There’s a whole generation growing up now who do NOT remember 9/11. The wars are winding down (although the debt they left us has not). We’ve got a vigorous non-profit sector of hackers (in the good sense of the term) who are building applications from open source and demanding open government data. A whole set of technologies is sprouting which will enrich our lives: network-connected glasses, autonomous vehicles, tablet and smartphone computers, and other wonders yet to be unveiled.

Lee Harvey Oswald robbed a generation of its youth. 9/11 robbed more generations of our youth. Can our next generation perhaps live out its dreams?

Every teenager – including some of us 50 and 60 year old teenagers – seems to have a smart phone these days. I’m writing this on an airplane, and I just finished an intense, 20 minute “Angry Birds” session on my HTC Android smart phone (yes, it was in “airplane” mode!). And I’m almost a Luddite when it comes to apps and smart phones.

But many people young and old commonly use their smart phones or tablet computers to do interesting, productive activities such as:

Gee, some people even use their smart phones to actually make voice telephone calls!?

So why don’t cops and firefighters, emergency medical technicians and electrical lineworkers, public works and transportation department employees, and a whole other host of critical and important government workers use smart phones in their daily jobs?

Of course these public safety workers DO use smart phones. Often they use their PERSONAL smart phones to do some part of their job. But rarely do governments give their workers smart phones – other than BlackBerrys for email, that is – to officially do their jobs and become much more productive. In fairness, that’s not because Mayors and County Executives and Governors are unsupportive, or government CFOs are enny-pinching.

We don’t give government workers these important tools for two basic reasons:

The apps don’t exist;

There is no guarantee of priority access to commercial cell phone networks.

In terms of the “apps”, most governments use a relatively small set of applications from a few vendors – there are records management systems, computer-aided dispatch systems, utility billing systems, work management systems, etc. And many of the vendors of those systems only recently have built them to accept even web-browser access. The terms and conditions for our (government’s) use of such software explicitly says we’ll only use the software with vendor approved configurations, or the vendor won’t give us support. And most vendors for these government-specific systems don’t make a version of their application which runs on a smart phone, whether it is a Windows Phone 7, Apple iPad or Iphone, or Google Android.

Software companies: Get on the stick and write smart phone apps for your software. ‘nuf said.

More importantly, government workers presently have to use commercial mobile networks for their smart phones. And on those networks, public safety and critical infrastructure workers have no priority. That means your teenager (even if she’s 50 years old) has the same priority as a cop or firefighter or electrical lineworker responding to a major incident or emergency.

Do you want that emergency medical technician responding to YOUR heart attack to have priority access – wirelessly and in real time – to your medical history, and to the emergency room doctors at the level 1 trauma center, and to a video conference with your cardiologist? Of course you do!

During a robbery, when you or your employees are being held up at gunpoint, don’t you want the responding cops to be able to see the video of your store – including the images of the perpetrators, in real time as they respond? And have passers-by snapping photos and video of the perps to send to 911 centers using next generation 911 technologies? Of course you do!

When your electrical power is out, or your water is interrupted, don’t you want that utility worker to have access to all the diagrams and network configurations so they can accurately pinpoint where the outage is and rapidly fix it? Well, of course you do.

If, all of a sudden, a kid in your child’s high school goes crazy and brings a gun to that school, taking teachers and students hostage, don’t you want responding cops and firefighters to have access to the video cameras with interior views of the school, and to the school’s building plan showing all the exits, and maybe even to the GPS on the cell phone used by the kid with the gun so they can see his (they are all boys, alas) exact position in the school? Obviously we do.

But the blunt fact of the matter is this: At the same time you are having a heart attack, or your business is being robbed, or your electricity fails, or a school lockdown occurs – everyone who has a cell phone within a mile of the incident may be texting and calling and tweeting and sending photographs to their loved ones, and the commercial cellular networks will be overloaded.

That’s why we don’t give cops and firefighters smart phones. Because – besides the fact that safe, secure, apps don’t exist – when responders most need their smart phones, the cell phone networks will be overloaded and fail them.

Is there a way out of this dilemma? “Of course there is!”

Several bills are pending in Congress today which would allocate wireless spectrum for priority use by police, firefighters, emergency medical techs – and also by electrical lineworkers, public works employees and transportation workers . Those same bills would auction other spectrum for use by carriers, producing almost $26 billion in revenue to both reduce the federal government deficit and to build a nationwide public safety network which responders could use – with priority over all other users and uses.

Then those first and second responders could use smart phone applications every day, confident that the network will be available, no matter what nearby teenagers are doing.

But, like so much else in this year of 2011, Congress is in deadlock. Some brave Senators and Representatives such as Jay Rockefeller
and Kay Bailey Hutchison (with Senate Bill S.911) and Peter King and Maria Cantwell and Dave Reichert do step up to the plate, led by Vice President Joe Biden. They all support creation of a nationwide public safety wireless broadband network. At the same time, many others in Congress stall and block the work, while people needlessly are hurt or die.

Why don’t cops and firefighters use smart phones? Because some in Congress would rather play politics, argue endlessly, and pinch funding than give our responders the tools they need to save lives and protect property every day, as well as during future disasters.

With the 10th anniversary of the September 11th World Trade Center disaster just a month away, does this dithering make sense? Of course it doesn’t.

It is fascinating how words and phrases take on difference nuances of meaning depending upon their context. I guess that’s why it is so hard for computers (IBM’s Watson notwithstanding) to understand and properly interpret human speech or, in many cases, writing. Take “911”. In most contexts and for most people, that would be the police/fire emergency number . The number you’d call to get help with a heart attack or a burglary-in-progress or a lost child.

But 9/11 refers to that infamous day when terrorist Osama bin Laden’s gang of terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center in New York City.

That bill passed out of the Senate Commerce Committee on a vote of 21 to 4 on June 8th.

On June 16th, Vice President Joe Biden and public safety officials from cities and states across the country celebrated this huge step forward on a long road toward building that network. Biden, Attorney General Eric Holder, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly and many others called upon the full Senate and House to pass the bill, so the President could sign it this year.

You don’t usually think of Senators as “courageous”, but we have twenty-one really courageous Senators on that Commerce Committee (and a courageous former senator in Vice President Biden).

They faced (and continue to face) a wide variety of pressures:

The continuing pain of the Federal budget deficit, which threatens to suck away the almost $12 billion allocated in this bill for public safety.

The pressure from some wireless telecommunications companies, who would rather see that spectrum given to them to build more consumer networks;

The Federal debt ceiling – which needs to be raised for the economic health of the nation – but many in Congress are holding that rise hostage to force budget cuts;

A lack of trust by some in the ability of state and local governments, who some believe cannot be trusted to continue to build out the network. This is ironic, because when anyone telephones 911, it is local police, firefighters and emergency medical technicians who respond. Furthermore, eight local governments are already building these networks under waivers from the FCC;

A need by electric and water utilities, transportation agencies, and other critical infrastructure providers for spectrum to build their own interoperable networks so they can respond to hurricanes, tornadoes, windstorms and earthquakes too – luckily, if S.911 passes Congress, it would modify Federal law and allow these utilities to share the public safety network and spectrum;

Oh, did I mention the Federal budget deficit as an as an excuse to NOT giving cops and firefighters and local governments the network they need to keep us all safe?

These are all poor reasons used to justify voting “no” on S.911. Reasons to justify inaction. Reasons to put the safety of 300 million Americans aside.

Yes, there is a lot of courage on that Senate Commerce Committee, and hopefully the courage is infectious and spreads to at least the 51 Senators and 217 members of the House needed to pass the legislation.

Because 9/11 is looming again.

9/11/11.

The 10th Anniversary of the terrorism at New York City’s World Trade Center. Where hundreds of firefighters and police officers lost their lives because their radio communications networks didn’t get them the order to evacuate the buildings which were about to collapse.

Police officers and firefighters carry $5000 radios. Local and state governments spend hundreds of millions of dollars to build public safety radio networks. Yet, today, cell phone networks seem to be everywhere, most people carry a mobile phone and many of us think paying $199 for an iPhone is expensive.

Why can’t cops and firefighters and emergency medical technicians (EMT) use cell phones like everyone else? A Washington State legislator from Seattle recently public argued for this approach in his blog. And, at first, this appears to be a simple way for governments to save a lot of taxpayer dollars.

Here are a few reasons public safety officers need their own dedicated networks:

Priority. Cellular networks do not prioritize their users or traffic. A teenager’s cell phone has the same priority as a cell phone used by a police officer or, for that matter, the BlackBerry used by President Obama. We’ve all experienced “no circuits available” or “network busy” when using a cell phone. When I’m being assaulted or have been injured in an automobile accident or even have had my house burglarized, the last thing I want is to have the network be “busy” so a police officer or EMT couldn’t be dispatched. Public safety needs dedicated frequencies where police officer sand firefighters have priority and even, perhaps, exclusive rights to for use, without calls being clogged by the public.

Reliability. Seattle’s public safety radio network, part of the larger King County-wide 800 megahertz public safety radio network, handles more than 60,000 police, fire and emergency medical calls every day. It operated last year with 99.9994% reliability – that’s about 189 seconds of downtime out of more the than 31 million seconds which composed the year 2009. On the average, only about five out of the 60,000 calls were delayed for any reason, and even then the average delay was about two seconds. What cell phone network has that kind of reliability? How many times have you experienced “no service” or “call dropped” with your cell phone? Do we want firefighters who are reviving a heart attack victim and talking to the emergency room on the radio to all-of-a-sudden have their call dropped? Or should police officers lose service when drunk drivers clog the roads and bars are closing at 2:00 AM because a cell phone company decides to do maintenance because “no one uses the network then”?

Disasters. Even small disasters cause cell phone networks to collapse. In Seattle, we’ve had swat team actions or car accidents which have shut down a freeway. Suddenly cell phone service abruptly ceases in that area because EVERYONE is on their phone. A few years ago a rifleman was loose and shooting people in Tacoma Mall. Responding police and EMTs had communications because they had dedicated networks and frequencies, but again cell phone networks were overloaded and down. In a larger disaster such as an earthquake or hurricane (with associated evacuation of large cities), commercial networks will be overloaded or jammed for days by people trying to escape the affected areas. Do we want police and fire departments – or even transportation, electric utilities and public works departments – to be trying to use those same networks while they are are responding to the disaster? I don’t think so.

Talk-around. A key feature of most government-operated networks is something called talk-around or simplex or “walkie-talkie” mode. In this mode, individual radios talk directly to each other, without using a radio or cell tower. This is very important at incident scenes – firefighters commonly use it at the scene of a fire, because the radios will operate at the scene even if there isn’t a tower nearby. But this NEVER a feature of cellular phone networks. If the cell tower is down or out of range, that cell phone in your hands is a useless lump of plastic. But the radios of publicsafety officers still work and will talk to each other even without the tower.

Ruggedness. No firefighter in his/her right mind would fight a fire using a cell phone for communications. The heat, water and ruggedness of the environment would quickly destroy the device. Yet most public safety radios will survive being dropped repeatedly on the ground or being immersed in water for 30 minutes or more. No standard cell phone can survive the rigorous work of firefighting or policing.

Are there problems with the current dedicated public safety networks? Absolutely. The use proprietary technologies, for example “Project 25“. Theoretically all “Project 25″ radios work on any “Project 25″ radio system. But only a few of those are deployed around the nation. These proprietary technologies are one reason the radios cost up to $5,000 each.

Representative Carlyle, in his blog, proposes that we deploy “Tetra” radios for public safety. While Tetra is common in some parts of the world, it is not used at all in the United States. This is a dangerous proposal, because it means Tetra networks we buy would not work with the equipment used by any other government or telecommunciations carrier anywhere in the United States. If called to respond to a diaster overseas, we could talk to firefighters in Hong Kong or the police in Ireland, however.

Another problem we face is the small market – the total market for public safety is perhaps 10,000,000 radios which are replaced, say, once every 10 years. On the other hand, the cell phone market is huge – 260 million cell phones replaced every two years in the United States alone. The economies of scale means consumers will have a lot more choice, and their cell phones will be relatively cheap.

So is there some way to reduce the sky-high cost of these dedicated public safety networks while at the same time not endangering cops, firefighters, EMTs and the public in general?

Absolutely. The FCC, in its national broadband plan, and the federal Department of Commerce, with its forward-thinking grant program for broadband, are lighting the way for a new public safety network which will be more robust, national in scope, and interoperable. By “interoperable” I mean the new public safety equipment will probably operate almost anywhere in the nation, wether on a dedicated government network or on a commercial cell phone network. Here are some features of the new networks:

The FCC and major public safety organizations have called for the new public safety networks to be built using a fourth generation (4G) technology called LTE – long-term evolution. Not coincidently, this is the same technology which will be used by the major cell phone companies Verizon and AT&T when they construct their 4G networks. The commercial networks will operate on different frequencies than the public safety networks, but they will all be built in same general area of the wireless spectrum – the 700 megahertz (MHz) band.

Because they are all using the same technology (LTE) and are in a similar slice of radio spectrum (700 MHz) potentially they will all interoperate. That means that public safety officers will use the government networks and frequencies when they are within range, but could “roam” to a commercial network if necessary. So cops and firefighters will have the best of both worlds – coverage from dedicated government networks and coverage from multiple private carriers. The FCC is even considering rules which would require the commercial companies to give public safety priority on the commercial LTE networks.

Because everyone – consumers, cops, firefighters and even general government workers such as transporation and utilities – are all using LTE, constructing the networks can be much cheaper. Commercial telecommunications carriers could put government antennas and equipment at their cell sites, and vice-versa. Perhaps the network equipment at the cell site, or even the central switches could be shared as well. Public safety will still be using its own frequencies and have priority, but could share many other network elements.

And the radios used by individual public safety officers or placed in police vehicles and fire trucks can be much cheaper as well. Because manufacturers are all making equipment for the same technology – LTE – it could cost just a few hundred dollars. Again, there will be specialized and ruggedized devices for firefighters and others working in punishing environments, but the “innards” – the electronics – will be much less expensive.

Next, we have to get all first and second resopnders to use the same or common networks. Here in Washington State, for example, we have multiple overlapping and duplicate networks. City and County police and fire in the region have one network, each electric utility (e.g. Seattle City Light) have another network. Transportation departments have their own networks (e.g. Seattle Transportation and Washington State Transportation each have their own separate network). The Washington State Patrol has its own separate network. The State Department of Natural Resources has its own network. Fish and Wildlife has its own network. And federal government agencies (FBI, cutoms and immigration) have their own networks. This is patently stupid and expensive. As we build these new fourth generation LTE networks, we need to build a single network with lots of sites and a lot of redundancy and hardening to withstand disasters. And everyone – first and second responders from all agencies – should use it.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, all the networks will be nationally interoperable. The lack of communciations interoperability was a major finding of the Commission which investigated the September 11th World Trade Center attack. But with these new networks, a Seattle police officer’s 4th generation LTE device will also work on New York City’s LTE network or New Mexico’s :LTE network or on any Verizon or AT&T network anywhere in the nation. As disasters happen anywhere in the United States, and first and second responders are rushed to the scene of the disaster, they can take their communications gear with them and it will work.

The City of Seattle is one of a handful (about 20) forward-thinking governments leading the way to deploy these new networks. Seattle’s public safety LTE network, hopefully launched with a federal stimulus grant, will eventually expand throughout the Puget Sound region and across the State of Washington. The State of Oregon also has authority and a grant request to build an LTE network, and we are working with Oregon to make sure our networks work with each other seamlessly.

Is all of this a pipe dream? I don’t think so. A number of public and private companies, governments and telecommunciations carriers and equipment manufacturers are working together to realize it. Many of them are in the Public Safety Alliance. In the Federal government, the FCC is working with the National Institute of Standards and the Departments of Commerce and Homeland security are providing grant funding. It will take a lot of work and many years to realize this network.

But when it is finished, we’ll have public safety networks which work to keep us safe, and consumer networks which work to keep us productive and linked to our friends and families. These networks will be separate yet connected. They will be built from common technologies. And they will be less expensive for taxpayers than the networks we have today.

Original post: 23 May 2008
Life is full of coincidences and crossing paths on the journey of life. I had such a set of coincidences this week. On Tuesday night I had a couple glasses of wine with an acquaintance of mine, Gino Menchini, who was in town to keynote a conference. Gino was CIO of the City of New York for a few years early in Michael Bloomberg’s administration. I first met Gino at a “Large Cities CIOs” conference he hosted in NYC in 2004.
Tonight (May 22nd) the move “Battle in Seattle” kicked off the Seattle International Film Festival. This film purports to depict the WTO riots of 1999, which gave Seattle a huge black eye in the media, but also helped galvanize us to improve our preparedness for disasters.
Sunday morning, May 25th, a team of employees of my department – the Department of Information Technology (DoIT) of the City of Seattle, will give up a good chunk of their Memorial Day weekend to upgrade the major telephone switch serving Seattle’s City government to the latest release of the switch’s software. Many of these are the same folks who helped put the technology into the City of Seattle’s new Emergency Operations Center / Fire Alarm Center (see my blog entry from May 18th).
What do these events have in common? Just why are they a “coincidence”?
Just this: Heroism comes in many flavors. September 11th, unfortunately, created many heroes, most of which are still with us. Those are folks who supported the City of New York (and also Washington, D.C.) during those difficult days. Gino was one of them – although he was working as an account executive for Cisco Systems on September 11th, he ran TOWARD the World Trade Center, and “collected” (appropriated?) a lot of technology from Cisco to allow the City of New York’s Emergency Operations Center to be up and functioning within 24 hours of the disaster. He stayed on duty for weeks after that, helping to direct Cisco’s resources toward the recovery from that disaster.
Similarly, the WTO riots here in Seattle created a number of heroes, including Assistant Police Chief Jim Pugel, who was a police Captain and in command of the police officers on the street during that difficult week. Jim is one of the most caring, unassuming people you’d ever meet. But he took care of his officers and protected the people of Seattle despite terrible planning by the City (thank you Paul Schell) in preparing for the event.
In their own ways, those DoIT employees coming in on Sunday to upgrade a telephone switch are also quiet heroes. While many people are enjoying their Memorial Day weekend, these folks will be in downtown Seattle working. The City of Seattle’s phone network is up and available over 99.99% of the time, which is really important in disasters and emergencies, because it WORKS when the public telephone network will be overloaded. As I mentioned, these are the same folks who worked many long hours to install technology in the EOC to make it quite prepared to weather and manage future disasters. And on September 11th, 2001, they stayed on the job in a skyscraper in downtown Seattle, keeping City of Seattle technology operating, when all the employees of banks and private companies left those skyscrapers and went home in fear.
These are different levels of heroism, but they all require commitment to keeping the people of the United States, the City of New York and the City of Seattle safe. And these are the quiet heroes, not the folks who get a medal or have their name on the front page.
I am so proud to know and work with them.